[News] Why We Won’t Wait - Resisting the War Against the Black and Brown Underclass

[Anti-Imperialist News]

November 25, 2014
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/11/25/75039/

*Resisting the War Against the Black and Brown Underclass*


  Why We Won’t Wait

by ROBIN D.G. KELLEY

Wait. Patience. Stay Calm. “This is a country that allows everybody to 
express their views,” said the first Black president, “allows them to 
peacefully assemble, to protest actions that they think are unjust.” 
Don’t disrupt, express. Justice will be served. We respect the rule of 
law. This is America.

We’ve all been waiting for the grand jury’s decision, not because most 
of us expected an indictment. District Attorney Robert P. McCulloch’s 
convoluted statement explaining—or rather, defending—how the grand jury 
came to its decision resembled a victory speech. For a grand jury to 
find no probable cause even on the lesser charge of involuntary 
manslaughter is a stunning achievement in a police shooting of an 
unarmed teenager with his hands raised, several yards away. Distilling 
4,799 pages of grand jury proceedings to less than twenty minutes, he 
managed to question the integrity of eyewitnesses, accuse the 24-hour 
news cycle and social media for disrupting the investigation, and blame 
alleged neighborhood violence for why the removal of Mike Brown’s body 
from the pavement had to wait until morning. McCulloch never indicted a 
cop in his life, so why expect anything different now?

Some waited hoping for a miracle; most waited because they knew a crisis 
was brewing. The white folks in St. Louis and surrounding 
municipalities, as well as the state of Missouri, used the waiting 
period to prepare for war. Residents bought more guns and ammunition, 
stockpiled on plywood to cover store windows, installed alarm systems 
and window bars, stocked up on food and water. Governor Jay Nixon 
declared a state of emergency, calling up National Guard forces from 
across the state and beyond, training the state militia for riot control 
and counterinsurgency. The federal government has dispatched FBI agents, 
some presumably undercover operating inside protest movements. As I 
write these words, all forces are being deployed against protesters and 
the Black community more generally, and the governor has requested more 
National Guard troops.

Meanwhile, as we waited for the grand jury’s decision, a twelve-year-old 
Black boy named Tamir Rice was shot and killed by police in Cleveland 
because the officer mistook his toy gun for a real one. Tamir was 
playing outside of Cleveland’s Cudell Recreation Center, one of the few 
public facilities left that provide safe space for children.

As we waited, Cleveland cops took the life of Tanisha Anderson, a 
37-year-old Black woman suffering from bipolar disorder. Police arrived 
at her home after family members called 911 to help her through a 
difficult crisis, but rather than treat her empathetically they did what 
they were trained to do when confronted with Black bodies in Black 
neighborhoods—they treated her like an enemy combatant. When she became 
agitated, one officer wrestled her to the ground and cuffed her while a 
second officer pinned her “face down on the ground with his knee pressed 
down heavily into the back for 6 to 7 minutes, until her body went 
completely limp 
<http://revolution-news.com/call-for-help-leads-to-murder-officer-slams-innocent-woman-to-pavement/>.” 
She stopped breathing. They made no effort to administer CPR, telling 
the family and witnesses that she was sleeping. When the ambulance 
finally arrived twenty minutes later, she was dead.

As we waited, police in Ann Arbor, Michigan, killed a forty-year-old 
Black woman named Aura Rain Rosser 
<http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/11/21/beauty-and-police/>. She was 
reportedly brandishing a kitchen knife when the cops showed up on a 
domestic violence call, although her boyfriend who made the initial 
report insisted that she was no threat to the officers. No matter; they 
opened fire anyway.

As we waited, a Chicago police officer fatally shot 19-year-old Roshad 
McIntosh. Despite the officer’s claims, several eyewitnesses reported 
that McIntosh was unarmed, on his knees with his hands up, begging the 
officer to hold his fire.

As we waited, police in Saratoga Springs, Utah, pumped six bullets into 
Darrien Hunt, a 22-year-old Black man dressed kind of like a ninja and 
carrying a replica Samurai sword. And police in Victorville, California, 
killed Dante Parker, a 36-year-old Black man and father of five. He had 
been stopped while riding his bike on suspicion of burglary. When he 
became “uncooperative,” the officers repeatedly used Tasers to try to 
subdue him. He died from his injuries.

As we waited, a twenty-eight-year-old Black man named Akai Gurley met a 
similar fate as he descended a stairwell in the Louis H. Pink Houses in 
East New York, Brooklyn. The police were on a typical reconnaissance 
mission through the housing project. Officer Peter Liang negotiated the 
darkened stairwell, gun drawn in one hand, flashlight in the other, 
prepared to take down any threat he encountered. According to liberal 
mayor Bill DeBlasio and police chief Bill Bratton, Mr. Gurley was 
collateral damage. Apologies abound. He left a two-year-old daughter.

As we waited, LAPD officers stopped 25-year-old Ezell Ford, a mentally 
challenged Black man, in his own South Los Angeles neighborhood and shot 
him to death. The LAPD stopped Omar Abrego, a 37-year-old father from 
Los Angeles, and beat him to death.

And as we waited and waited and waited, Darren Wilson got married, 
continued to earn a paycheck while on leave, and received over $400,000 
worth of donations for his “defense.”

You see, we’ve been waiting for dozens, hundreds, thousands of 
indictments and convictions. Every death hurts. Every exonerated cop, 
security guard, or vigilante enrages. The grand jury’s decision doesn’t 
surprise most Black people because we are not waiting for an 
/indictment/. We are waiting for justice—or more precisely, struggling 
for justice.  We all know the names and how they died. Eric Garner, 
Kajieme Powell, Vonderitt D. Meyers, Jr., John Crawford III, Cary Ball 
Jr., Mike Brown, ad infinitum. They were unarmed and shot down by police 
under circumstances for which lethal force was unnecessary. We hold 
their names like recurring nightmares, accumulating the dead like 
ghoulish baseball cards. Except that there is no trading. No forgetting. 
Just a stack of dead bodies that rises every time we blink. For the last 
three generations, Eleanor Bumpurs, Michael Stewart, Eula Love, Amadu 
Diallo, Oscar Grant, Patrick Dorismond, Malice Green, Tyisha Miller, 
Sean Bell, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Margaret LaVerne Mitchell, to name a 
few, have become symbols of racist police violence.   And I’m only 
speaking of the dead—not the harassed, the beaten, the humiliated, the 
stopped-and-frisked, the raped.

Meanwhile, Governor Jay Nixon, President Obama, Attorney General Eric 
Holder, the mainstream press and every state-anointed Negro leader 
lecture Black people to stay calm and remain non-violent, when the main 
source of violence has been the police. Mike Brown’s murder brought 
people out to the streets, where they were met with tear gas and rubber 
bullets. State violence is always rendered invisible in a world where 
cops and soldiers are heroes, and what they do is always framed as 
“security,” protection, and self-defense. Police occupy the streets to 
protect and serve the citizenry from (Black) criminals out of control. 
This is why, in every instance, there is an effort to /depict the victim 
as assailant /– Trayvon Martin used the sidewalk as a weapon, Mike Brown 
used his big body.   A lunge or a glare from a Black person can 
constitute an imminent threat. When the suburb of Ferguson blew up 
following Mike Brown’s killing on August 9, the media and mainstream 
leadership were more concerned with looting and keeping the “peace” than 
the fact that Darren Wilson was free on paid leave. Or that leaving 
Brown’s bullet-riddled, lifeless body, on the street for four and a half 
hours, bleeding, cold, stiff from rigor mortis, constituted a war crime 
in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. It was, after all, an act 
of collective punishment – the public display of the tortured corpse was 
intended to terrorize the entire community, to punish everyone into 
submission, to remind others of their fate if they step out of line. We 
used to call this “lynching.”

War? Yes, war. The immediate and sustained resistance to the police 
following Mike Brown’s murder revealed the low intensity war between the 
state and Black people, and the disproportionate use of force against 
protesters following the grand jury’s decision escalated the conflict. 
To the world at large, Ferguson looked like a war zone because the 
police resembled the military with their helmets, flak jackets, armed 
personnel carriers, and M-16 rifles. But African-American residents of 
Ferguson and St Louis proper, and in impoverished communities across the 
country, did not have to endure tear gas or face down riot cops to know 
that they were already living in a war zone—hence Mike Brown’s and 
Dorian Johnson’s initial trepidation toward the police.

Past and present police violence in the area gave Brown and Johnson good 
reason to fear Wilson. The prosecution turned what may have seemed like 
a reasonable act of self-defense on the part of a startled and angry 
eighteen-year-old kid into an “assault of a law officer in the first 
degree.” That Wilson feared for his life was all he needed to justify 
lethal force. But it is the instructions to the grand jury toward the 
end of the three-month-long deliberations that deserve our attention. 
After asking jurors to judge Wilson’s actions against Missouri statute 
on police use of deadly force, the assistant county prosecutors, Sheila 
Whirley and Kathi Alizadeh, suddenly announced that after “doing our 
research” they learned that the statute had been superseded by a U.S. 
Supreme Court decision. In lieu of the decision and the old statute, 
Whirley wrote up a description of how the law applies when an officer 
can use force when making an arrest. When a grand juror began asking 
questions for clarification, Whirley explains that the old law “is not 
entirely incorrect or inaccurate, but there is something that is not 
correct, ignore it totally.” She then indicates that they will rely on 
the U. S. Supreme Court decision in Tennessee v. Garner 
<http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=CASE&court=US&vol=471&page=1> 
(1985), “not that that matters much to you. . . .   We don’t want to get 
into a law class.”   She went on to focus on the self-defense instruction.

But just a quick glance at the decision reveals that the ruling was 
intended to limit the use of deadly force, arguing that killing a 
fleeing suspect constitutes an intrusive “seizure” potentially violating 
4^th Amendment protections against being deprived of life. If a suspect 
is not armed and dangerous, the use of deadly force is not warranted and 
thus the seizure of life is not reasonable.

Whether we call it a war on drugs, or “Operation Ghetto Storm” as the 
Malcolm X Grassroots Movement dubs it, what we are dealing with is 
nothing less than permanent war waged by the state and its privatized 
allies on a mostly poor and marginalized Black and Brown working-class. 
Five centuries in the making, it stretches from slavery and imperialism 
to massive systematic criminalization. We see the effects on our 
children, in the laws that make it easier to prosecute juveniles as 
adults; in the deluge of zero tolerance policies (again a by-product of 
the war on drugs); in the startling fact that expulsions and suspensions 
have risen exponentially despite a significant decline in violent crime. 
Crisis, moral panics, neoliberal policies, racism fuel an expansive 
system of human management based on incarceration, surveillance, 
containment, pacification, lethal occupation, and gross misrepresentation.

The Black community of Ferguson and adjacent communities experience war 
every single day, in routine police stops, fines for noise ordinance 
violations (e.g., playing loud music), for fare-hopping on St. Louis’s 
light rail system, for uncut grass or unkempt property, trespassing, 
wearing “saggy pants,” expired driver’s license or registration, 
“disturbing the peace,” among other things. If these fines or tickets 
are not paid, they may lead to jail time, the loss of one’s car or other 
property, or the loss of one’s children to social services. The criminal 
justice system is used to exact punishment and tribute, a kind of racial 
tax, on poor/working class Black people. In 2013, Ferguson’s municipal 
court issued nearly 33,000 arrest warrants to a population of just over 
21,000, generating about $2.6 million dollars in income for the 
municipality. That same year, 92 percent of searches and 86 percent of 
traffic stops in Ferguson involved black people, this despite the fact 
that one in three whites was found carrying illegal weapons or drugs, 
while only one in five blacks had contraband.

And yet, defenders of the status quo always deflect critiques of state 
violence by citing the number of intra-racial homicides in low-income 
Black communities. Who can forget former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s 
recent quip 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2014/11/23/giuliani-white-police-officers-wouldnt-be-there-if-you-werent-killing-each-other/> 
to Michael Eric Dyson on “Meet the Press”?: “White police officers 
wouldn’t be there [in black neighborhoods] “if you weren’t killing each 
other.” Racist bluster, to be sure, but such assertions have succeeded 
in foreclosing a deeper interrogation of how neoliberal policies (i.e., 
dismantling the welfare state; promoting capital flight; privatizing 
public schools, hospitals, housing, transit, and other public resources; 
investing in police and prisons,) are /a form of state violence /that 
produces scarcity, environmental and health hazards, poverty, and 
alternative (illegal) economies rooted in violence and subjugation.

Ironically, Giuliani’s vitriol makes a compelling case for the failure 
of modern law enforcement. If the police are charged with keeping the 
peace and protecting citizens, but instead have contributed to the 
“epidemic” of violent deaths, then a case can be made for the complete 
withdrawal of the police from Black and Brown neighborhoods. The police 
are trained for combat and often regard the youth in low-income 
communities of color as potential enemy combatants. This is why the 
killing of “innocent” Black men in dark stairwells, Black women with 
kitchen knives, or little boys brandishing toy guns are not accidents.   
Cops patrol these areas with their weapon close at hand; behind every 
shadow lurks a suspect, and in war it is kill or be killed.

In light of Missouri’s failure to indict Darren Wilson for the murder of 
Mike Brown, calling for the withdrawal of the police—even temporarily—is 
a reasonable demand for people terrorized by state violence and feeling 
particularly vulnerable over their safety. They want law and order, but 
the police have shown a consistent disrespect for the law, flagrantly 
violated the Constitution, and operated with little to no 
accountability. Instead, the police operate as a rogue outfit, their 
actions create disorder and fear. Furthermore, failure to indict 
effectively exonerates the police force, providing a pretext for the 
police to ramp up violence and repression in response to the legitimate 
expression of anger and frustration over the government’s failure to 
protect Black lives and ensure justice. It is already happening in the 
aftermath of the grand jury’s decision, as riot police invade the 
headquarters of Hands Up United as well as designated safe spaces.

The young organizers in Ferguson from Hands Up United, Lost Voices, 
Organization for Black Struggle, Don’t Shoot Coalition, Millennial 
Activists United, and the like, understand they are at war. Tef Poe, 
Tory Russell, Montague Simmons, Cheyenne Green, Ashley Yates, and many 
other young Black activists in the St. Louis area have not been waiting 
around for an indictment. Nor are they waiting for the much vaunted 
Federal probe, for they have no illusions about a federal government 
that provides military hardware to local police, builds prisons, kills 
tens of thousands by manned and unmanned planes without due process, and 
arms Israel in its illegal wars and occupation. They have been 
organizing. So have the young Chicago activists who founded We Charge 
Genocide and the Black Youth Project, and the Los Angeles-based youth 
who make up the Community Rights Campaign, and the hundreds of 
organizations across the country challenging everyday state violence and 
occupation. They remind us, not only that Black lives matter—that should 
be self-evident—but that resistance matters. It matters because we are 
still grappling with the consequences of settler colonialism, racial 
capitalism and patriarchy. It mattered in post-Katrina New Orleans, a 
key battleground in neoliberalism’s unrelenting war on working people, 
where Black organizers lead multiracial coalitions to resist the 
privatization of schools, hospitals, public transit, public housing, and 
dismantling public sector unions.   The young people of Ferguson 
continue to struggle with ferocity, not just to get justice to Mike 
Brown or to end police misconduct but to dismantle racism once and for 
all, to bring down the Empire, to ultimately end war.

/*Robin D. G. Kelley*, who teaches at UCLA, is the author of the 
remarkable biography Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American 
Original 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1439190461/counterpunchmaga> (2009) 
and most recently Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in 
Revolutionary Times 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674046242/counterpunchmaga>(2012). 
He is a contributor to /Killing Trayvons: an Anthology of American 
Violence <http://store.counterpunch.org/product/killing-trayvons/>.//

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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